


Immortal Aching

by 221brothermine



Category: Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula (TV 2020)
Genre: Dracula AU, F/M, Or Is It?, Unrequited Lust, this show is a hot mess but I LOVE it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:47:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22245823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221brothermine/pseuds/221brothermine
Summary: You can know every part of someone and love them or loathe them. Agatha, maybe she didn’t love him, exactly, but Zoe – oh, Zoe certainly hated him.
Relationships: Dracula & Agatha Van Helsing, Dracula & Zoe Van Helsing, Dracula/Agatha Van Helsing, Dracula/Zoe Van Helsing
Comments: 27
Kudos: 165





	Immortal Aching

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternate universe where the lawyer plotline never happened and Dracula remains in his cell without quite so easily adjusting to the modern world like he wants to. AKA, the version of events I would've rather happened. Hope you enjoy. :)

Zoe doesn’t bother entertaining his jokes, though he attempts many. She goes about her job with clinical indifference, sampling his blood with the least bit of chatter as possible. She’s repulsed by him and all he’s done. He killed her great-great-aunt yet still talks about Agatha like she was his _friend._ Despite everything, all she’s seen working for MI6, she doesn’t have a strong stomach for _him_. She sometimes stumbles weakly to throw up in the bathroom. She tells herself it’s the chemo treatment she’s just started, but she knows it’s him, after he tells a particularly graphic fact, or whenever she sees him drink the gallons of blood they give him every day. Or maybe it’s not the physical things, but the psychological aspect – the knowledge of how many bodies he has disemboweled, the _rot_ of him. He presents himself handsome on the surface but sometimes she catches a whiff of the reflection in the glass and sees him for the corpse that he is.

They keep him in that facility, feed him with donated human blood and cattle blood, and they don’t get to kill him. Or experiment on him. Because it’s not _ethical._ They keep him locked away from others and that should be enough. But for fuck’s sake, it’s not enough. Zoe burns inside because she knows he _deserves_ to die. They have the means to do it, too. Could easily drive a tree log through him, need be. But no, out of her own damned, _hereditary_ sense of honor and just the heaps of trouble they’d get into, governmentally, she can’t, but oh, she’s burning with the want to. To give him a damn taste.

* * *

Dracula is _restless._ Zoe is what remains of Agatha, and he can’t get Agatha out of his mind. Zoe is not as interested in him as Agatha was - she’s not charmed. He can’t seduce her, not even to talk. He likes to talk, he finds. He would always talk to his victims, but now, without any, he’s got no one to entertain.

The other doctors and the mercenaries go about with stone faces. It is an understood fact amongst everyone in the facility that he should be looked at with the same indifference as a rat in a lab cage. And Zoe, the only one he might actually care to talk to, tortures him every minute she won’t look him in the eye and indulge a conversation. You can know every part of someone and love them or loathe them. Agatha, maybe she didn’t _love_ him, exactly, but Zoe – oh, Zoe certainly _hated_ him. And it drives him nuts not _because_ she hates him (many have, it’s a stipulation of the job), but that he wants her to _not._

* * *

He hisses at the artificial light of iPads and iPhones and it taking a week before he tentatively picks up the iPad in his cell and then grimaces when he sees his ancient reflection in the black mirror. The medical facility giving him blood donations and cattle blood, and for the first time ever, he feels damned _purposeless_. Drinking blood without taking lives is as new to him as breathing was old and forgotten.

For the first time in his life, or undeadness, he supposes, can drop the fight or flight instinct. He can just...be. He is fed, generously, and has to kill no one. Immortality is handed to him. And like any evolutionary instinct that becomes unnecessary with growing societal advancements, he’s got a lot of pent-up energy he doesn’t know where to put.

Now that he doesn’t have to hunt and kill, he swears he’s gaining weight. A slight bulge in his stomach. He moves around the cell, not in his supernatural way, but he jogs, like a _human._ To at least _feel_ like he’s chasing something.

Along with the physical examinations, they test his moods. Ask him questions. He hears their exchanges with each other from the hallways beyond the door. Don’t they know, with all they already know, that he can hear them? They call him anxious, desperate, _angry._ And then they don’t understand. “He’s the best-fed prisoner anywhere,” they say. Type O and A and B and AB, and the most intelligent people, too. He’s angry, all right, angry that he doesn’t get to pick and choose from the menu anymore. But he has to give them credit. He knows it was _her_ that knew, really. And Zoe chose well for him, even though she didn’t particularly like him. That made him smile.

He thinks of Agatha, and beyond an admiration for the cleverness of the women in her blood line, he feels... _something._ A new hunger. He thinks he’s not being well fed enough first, but he’s fed in gallons every day. And still something stirs in him. Chips away at him. He feels it especially when Zoe shows her face. A surge in his own pulse.

She visits more rarely as time passes. The other doctors are running the tests on him now, investigating him. But he stops being a novelty, to her and everyone else, and Zoe’s purpose goes beyond this facility, as he finds out. She’s a soldier of sorts, in his limited understanding of this world. (Oh, he _really_ overslept, and it angers him, that he doesn’t have an advantage over these people. That he’s got more blood than ever yet he feels slower than the _humans._ He’s _never_ slept that long.)

They say she serves an organization called MI6. Runs investigations. It makes his lip twitch, thinking she’s off in other places, other countries, investigating other...what? Vampires? They don’t tell him. “Matters of a supernatural nature” is the most he gets out of a doctor who takes his blood sample. She took it the first few times, now she has her servants do it for her. And she sneered, once, when he called her associates that. ”They’ve got PhDs and more knowledge than you’ve absorbed in all your lifetimes.” 

Still, he sees them for what they are. People doing her bidding because she’s the one who really runs this place. Makes the calls for when to draw his blood, what books he can have access to. He pretends not to be eager, but oh, the _literature_ he’s missed - he’s immortal and has nothing to do but he’s drowning in the sense he won’t have time for it all. Orwell, Plath, and, oh, Christie, courtesy of her name, feels like a twist of fate, gives him a laugh. King, a more modern one, is a victim he aspires to. Oh, to have a mind like _that._

* * *

She decides when to feed him. When to _feed_ him. Getting his food handpicked was like a mother shoving a plate of vegetables to a child who would rather eat nothing but. He can’t complain, though. The selections are satisfactory. He gets a taste for the new lingo quickly enough, though he can’t attach much meaning to it without the experience. Knows what a movie theatre is but no tactile memories of his own to show for it. 

She _knows_ him, picking the right blood. She knows him like Agatha knew him. They are different, to be sure – Zoe is more reserved, doesn’t raise her voice, always with the crossed arms (it doesn’t forcefully push him back but there is a sense of discomfort in _that_ sort of cross, too). And she attends to him like he is a dirty job she has to do, like cleaning out a chicken pen. Agatha was enthusiastic, wanted to _solve_ him – the myths, the legends, what was true and what was false. But Zoe – she could hardly give a damn. She’s short on the questions. He’s a contagion in her eyes. A fact of life she must attend to. He isn’t bothered, not really. If it only it wasn’t so confusing seeing the ghost of Agatha in her. Sometimes, the way she looks at him, it feels like Agatha’s disapproval. And that couldn’t be right. Agatha –well, there were no hard feelings there, were there? She thought she beat him, after all. They had fun. He let her _last,_ for pity’s sake! And she had descendants, which was more than he could say for himself. A happy ending after all.

But that’s not how Zoe looked at him. Anger rumbling in her eyes. At first he thought it was the cancer, but no, she very pointedly was angry at him. One thing she and Agatha shared - they were not privy to being seduced. An iron will - nothing he could offer to make them do the un-noble thing. He couldn’t cure Zoe’s cancer, either; if there was something to bribe her with, it had to be that. But he wasn’t much interested in doing science as much as simply watching it happen. But the humans haven’t advanced there yet. 

He’s been rereading the five books they gave him a week. He meant to tell Zoe to bring him more, he’s been re-reading then twice and thrice over. But she hasn’t stopped by in a month. And has she read these herself? What did the think of them? Did she pick them because she liked them – in which case she had refined taste? Or did she pick them because she knew he would? And again, circling back to the flattering possibility that she _knew_ him. Maybe there _was_ some curiosity she had for him. He had to know. 

So he asks. He must see Dr. Van Helsing on an urgent matter. _Doctor_ Van Helsing. She had one of those PhDs too. He’s well fed, yet that hunger again, something licking at his groin, the intelligence he could smell from close proximity. Not quite Agatha’s sure-fire wit - or maybe Zoe was holding out on him. She seemed to have a stiff upper lip reserved especially for him. but still, a quick mind. Suited for danger, fast on her feet. Suited for _him_. It makes him uncomfortable, sitting exposed by the glass walls of his cell, turning her over and over in his mind like that, the way he would with his victims, except he wasn’t hungry. Yet thinking of her made him pull at the collar of his shirt, as though it were tight. He feels... _hot._ As though he’s alive and pulsing like the rest of them. Complains about the ventilation to anyone that passes. They don’t listen. Either that, or he is sick. And feeling sick, he had to _see_ her.

He dozes in and out of sleep. In his coma he did not dream, but with the shorter rests, he does, now that they’ve moved a patch of his soil into the cell to sleep in. It’s her he sees most often. He remembers when Agatha pulled back her robe - never has there been a nun so keen to expose herself. The hollows of her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, flesh, ripe for the taking, offering herself to him like she _wanted_ it. How could he resist? In his dream, he lunges for her. When he wakes up, he’s sweating all the way through his shirt, gasping for breath. The press of his breeches is unmistakable. He groans. Oh heaven’s, no. Blood pulses through him but rarely _there._

When he had banged on the glass calling, “Hello? _Where_ is Dr. Helsing?”, the mercenary had looked straight ahead, indifferent. So he waited for the usual doctor, a man by the name of Wellington. He’s eaten a Wellington once or twice before. Commoners, one nobleman. He jokes around as such, _you’re not my first,_ but the doctor has an impassive face. No one laughs around here. 

He taps his foot impatiently, sitting as the doctor draws blood, pokes and prods at his eyes, tongue, skin with tools and instruments, the daily checkup. He asks, “When is she coming?”

“Dr. Van Helsing is busy. She’ll come when she can.” 

“When she _can?_ ” Dracula chuckles. “Does she not run this facility?” Where was her sense of responsibility? Neglecting a job like this. Neglecting _him._

“She trusts us to run it when she’s away.”

“Yes, yes. You’re her servants. But shouldn’t a master reside in their manor?”

“This isn’t her home.” _Home_. He tries to picture it, but it’s all smoke. It’s infuriating, not just having her at his disposal to taste her and find out. He tries to conjure up a memory from when he’s had her blood, but he can’t. He has to growl out the question. 

“Where _is_ her home, then?”

“Far from here,” is Dr. Wellington’s curt response. He doesn’t miss the sense of disdain. Not the doctor’s, but hers, passed on. What he meant to say was far from _him._

* * *

Zoe has nightmares that are new. She’s always been a fairly light sleeper, having to be ready to get up at a moment’s notice, the natural restlessness that comes from the job, and then just drinking too much coffee and waking up over and over from the caffeine that hasn’t left her bloodstream.

It’s him. Naked. And her, sprawled below him. And sometimes, it’s the reverse. Her on top, and his hands digging into the skin of her hips. She moves again him and feels alive. His eyes are heavy with desire, but they aren’t red, they’re black, pupils dilated. And in every dream he’s laughing at her. _You’re charmed after all._

She wakes up in a sweat, hand reaching for her throat. She feels nothing, but she can’t be sure. She flips on the light, looks around her room to study the shadows with caution, then dashes to the bathroom to look at her reflection. She drags her hair away from her neck. Nothing. Just her veins pulsing with her heavy heartbeat. And a pulsing somewhere between her legs.

* * *

The next day, she goes to his cell. Practically presses her face against the glass. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He gets up from his reclining chair, putting down a book at a nearby table, and has the damned nerve to _smile_. “Ah, Zoe. It’s you.”

She has to take deep breaths through her nostrils as he approaches.

“I’ve been meaning to say, you must know I am a fast reader. The books – five a week don’t suffice.” He pauses, shaking his head. “You – you’ve been away for a while,” he says, amusement tingeing his tone. “I like the hair.”

“I don’t want to be a part of your games.”

“What are you talking about?” he says, blinking, arms dropping to his sides.

“We treat you very well here. But mark my words, we can very well put an end to it if you try to manipulate your way out.”

“Manipulate my way out? Oh, can no compliment be taken sincerely, now? I know you are well beyond seducing.”

Yes, she’s trimmed it. The fringe. And dyed over the grey roots. But how dare he play innocent, talking of seducing. Dracula gives the kinds of dreams one can’t consent to – they don’t come from their own minds.

“Is it because of the doctor, then? I merely asked for your presence. He didn’t listen. I would’ve had you here sooner if I could’ve have.”

  
  
“So you resorted to haunting me in my dreams?” she bites.

“Dreams?” Dracula repeats, confused. “Zoe,” He says her name like he’s trying to be gentle with it, and it irks her, that she can’t tell what game he’s playing now. “I’ve given you no dreams. If I had your blood, perhaps, but – are you dreaming of me?”

“Don’t play innocent,” she says, balling her fists.

He frowns. “Doctor, this sounds like something of your own making.” He flashes a smile. “I’m flattered.”

“They are _not_ mine, and I know it.”

  
“Tell me, darling, what is it we did in those dreams?”  
  


“There was no _we_.”

  
“Really?” With a searing gaze, he looks at her from head toe. “That’s a shame.”

She folds her hands and raises her eyebrows. “They called me. Said you were restless. Nearly bit the doctor the other day. Why? You know our agreement. We feed you, you obey. If not, sunbeam, stake through the heart – you’re _dead_.”

He steps closer, pressing his head against the glass. “I’m no different than a tiger kept too long in a cage. I feel sick. I need to stretch my legs, Zoe.”

She shakes her head. “No. That’s not it. You have nothing to live for now, do you? You’re not a feral animal anymore, scavenging and looking for prey. You’re what you always were. Human. And humans can’t live without purpose. What’s yours?”

He stumbles, laughs. She turns and walks away, hands still folded, before he can answer. And even if she hadn’t walked away, she wasn’t sure he could.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments much appreciated!


End file.
